In the final analysis, terrorists are instrument of the oppressors against the oppressed majority. Nigerian ruling elites have been over the years maintaining its rule in Nigeria on the basis of divide and rule, a method inherited from colonial masters and perfected by Nigerian ruling elites. Ruling elites are scared of unity of Nigerians because, they correctly understand that with unity of Nigerians ending their corrupt rule will just be a matter of time. Ruling elites are united at the top, but they ensure that Nigerians are sharply divided across both religions and tribes below.

Boko Haram’s action is more and more divisive. With its action, it has emboldened this regime to allocate N921 billionforsecurity vote, obviously not for the purpose of fighting terrorism but to fight Nigerian masses who are presently on the move. Every of their action directly coincides with the interest of Nigerian ruling elites. Masses have correctly understood that their liberation and freedom lie in their unity across religion and tribal divides, but this drive always get challenged by the action of these fundamentalists and various charlatans.

We condemn the Goodluck regime’s sponsored invasion of the National Secretariat of the Nigerian Labour Congress, NLC, in Abuja by thugs and the police on Friday, 7/1/12. This confirms the desperation of the government and shows how low they can go towards maintaining the attacks on the lives of the Nigerian people and how desperate they are to maintain the current fuel price increment. Already this action is being condemned globally.

The thugs stormed the NLC office in the morning under the protection of soldiers and police officers.

By the time the current strike of Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, commenced on December 5 2011, it had been two long years after they had an agreement with the Federal Government. That was in 2009. The 2009 Agreement is actually a review of the 2001 Agreement.

Earlier in September, ASUU had embarked on a one-week warning strike and the union shifted lots of grounds by extending the period for dialogue with the hope that the federal government would be sincere.

Currently, major attacks have been launched by the Goodluck regime against PHCN workers. Soldiers have taken over all the power stations, transmission stations and major PHCN offices nationwide and leaders of the power sector unions were arrested for some days and are all on the watch list. The plan is to ‘wind down’ PHCN by the first quarter of 2012.

PHCN workers had embarked on a 2-day strike to protest these assaults, it was this that forced the government to release the union officers but the armed take over and other atrocities are still continuing.

Nothing can testify to man’s bestiality towards fellow man as the current attempt by the Goodluck Jonathan’s regime attempt to further increase the price of petrol. Nothing is as wicked as this program and it has fully exposed the true face of the regime to the overwhelming majority.

Coming at a time when the overwhelming majority are living in abject poverty with no hope in sight, large numbers are living on less than $2.00 a day. This will no doubt be a death blow to many in Nigeria.

Since the LASU authorities declared in October the draconian increment in school fees, LASU students have embarked on a heroic struggle against this grand assault on education. They have not only boycotted lectures they have embarked on exam boycott and mass protests.

The over 725% fee increment was authorized by the Fasola led ACN government in Lagos. The fees were quite outrageous to say the least and it exposed the true nature of the ACN for what it really is – an anti-people party making pretension to be ‘progressive’.

17 December, marks the first anniversary of the Arab revolution. On this day, one year ago, Mohammad Bouazizi, a young Tunisian fruit vendor, driven by desperation, poverty, and anger, set himself on fire in the city of Sidi Bouzid. The revolutionary wildfire that began after his death — first in southern Tunisia, then the entire country, then erupting across the entire Arab-speaking world—marked a turning point in human history.

One year later, it is clear that the revolution is by no means is over. The objective situation has never been as favourable for the revolution as now; however, a revolution is not a one act drama. The carnival atmosphere that transcended the early days of the revolution is being replaced by a more serious acknowledgement that more is needed to solve the main contradictions.

After 9 months of struggle, a major face-off is being prepared and the revolution is throwing all its forces to a single point of attack. For a number of days last week, a campaign for an open ended general strike was waged on all the web pages of the revolution. A call was made also by the Syrian National Council, the General Commission of the Syrian Revolution and other political forces for full participation in the strike. For the first time it looked that the organizers were taking the question of the general strike very seriously, drawing out a plan, and preparing leaflets for printing and distribution. The first date was chosen to be December 11.

Although the Nigerian economy has been officially growing at over 6% for the past 5 years, the poverty rate keeps increasing; youth unemployment has risen to an unprecedented 47% and over 80 per cent of Nigerian youth don’t have more than a secondary school certificate.

Infrastructure is collapsing with power generation hovering between 1,000 to 3,500 mega-watts, when Nigeria actually needs over 75,000 mega-watts to power its size. Out of over 160,000 kilometres of secondary and tertiary roads in Nigeria, with an average registered network of 4,000 kilometres per state, only about 10–15 per cent is paved. While a large proportion of this network remains in poor or very poor condition with only 15 per cent of federal roads in good condition.

Written by Mousa Ladqani and Isa Al-Jaza'iri
Thursday, 15 December 2011 00:46

Dramatic events have shaken the already stormy Syrian scene in the last month: strikes, demonstrations in downtown Damascus, attacks on intelligence headquarters, and condemnation by the Arab League. The Syrian regime looks weaker than ever and much exhausted, and a balance of forces favourable to the revolution seems to be the new reality. The arrival on the scene of a mass militia is an important shift in the situation which not only worries the regime, but also the bourgeois opposition and its imperialist allies.

At the end of my article on the Russian elections I wrote: “What happened in Tunisia and Egypt can also happen in Russia.” Events have begun to move in that direction far more quickly than I anticipated. In the last few days the cities of Russia have been swept by mass demonstrations.

In Moscow at least 50,000 people gathered on Saturday to protest the rigging of the elections. Some estimates put the figure at anything up to 100,000. It is impossible to verify these estimates, but the photos published on the Internet show that they were massive. In Petersburg 12,000 people protested, the biggest demonstration since 1995. In Nizhny Novgorod, Krasnoyarsk, Vladivostok and many other cities there were smaller demonstrations of a few thousands.

The parliamentary elections in Russia on Sunday, December 4, were seen as a popularity test of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is running for the presidency in March. The result was a blow to Putin, registering a sharp fall in support for his United Russia party. According to the official results, which are undoubtedly rigged, United Russia obtained just under half of valid votes cast, which gives it a very small majority in the State Duma.

Workers at Waha Oil company have been on strike and holding protests for 7 weeks now. Their main demand is the purge of the top management of the company from directors whom they accuse of being stooges of the old regime. It is an example of class issues coming to the fore once the old regime has been put to one side.

The capture and killing of Colonel Gaddafi has been described in detail by the mass media in all its gory details. With the death of Gaddafi and the taking of Sirte the National Transitional Council is talking about forming a transitional government. The NTC is recognized by the imperialist powers whose interests it represents. However, many ordinary Libyans look with justified mistrust at the NTC and their imperialist backers.

Although Gaddafi was captured alive he was summarily shot. But it is not difficult to see why he was not arrested and put on trial. Had he faced a trial he would have exposed all his past dealings with the likes of Blair, Sarkozy and Berlusconi. That explains why they have revelled so much in his death. Their hypocrisy stinks to high heaven, as they had made many lucrative deals with Gaddafi in the past, even handing over people to his regime who were subsequently tortured.

The death of Gaddafi and the final collapse of his regime closes one chapter. However, this merely marks one turning point in the situation. Now that the old regime is finally gone, a struggle will open up over the future of Libya. In this struggle we will see the forces of both revolution and counter-revolution trying to get the upper hand. Here we publish an analysis of the situation by Alan Woods.

The Relevance of Marxism Today was written by Alan Woods and Ted Grant in 1994. It explains all the factors that have led to the present crisis, and although the temporary and unprecedented credit bubble allowed the system to avoid a serious recession for an extended period of time, eventually all the factors explained in this article have come to the surface.

Europe is standing on the edge of a precipice. This is the judgement, not just of the Marxists, but of the most serious strategists of Capital. Barely six weeks have passed since the latest Greek rescue package, and it is already unravelling. There is now a general crisis of confidence in the ranks of the bourgeoisie internationally. The panic, which is reflected in the wild gyrations of the stock exchanges, has spread rapidly from Europe to America. It is a kind of deadly contagion that has infected all the euro zone’s big countries.

There is now open speculation about the euro’s survival and even that of the European Union itself. The whole situation hangs in the balance. And all for what? Because Greece cannot pay its bills. But this was surely no surprise. Every serious person knew full well that the crisis of the Greek economy was so deep that all the rescue packages could do was to buy a little time.

In 2005, during the tenure of Obasanjo with Okonjo Iweala as Finance minister, Nigeria paid a whopping sum of 12 Billion dollars to buy back 18 Billion dollars debt owed Paris club. This prepared the ground for Nigeria to completely pay off its debt by April 2006 and made her first African country to fully pay off its debt (estimated at $30 billion) owed to the Paris Club. This “exit” from debt trap was celebrated both nationally and internationally; the celebration alone was estimated to gulp 2.4Billion Naira.

This further confirmed the subservience nature of Nigerian ruling elites to their foreign masters in the west. This 12Billion Dollars would have gone a long way in solving many infrastructural challenges, the health, education and power would have positively benefitted immensely from this windfall, but those become completely unimportant when the interest of Nigerian ruling class or their masters are involved. Despite the fact that, over 35Billion dollars already paid in interest and the destination of this debt cannot be rationally traced, yet it was still the priority of thieving gangsters to dole out such a huge amount, under a dubious buy back deal.

A deal to raise the debt ceiling has now been reached, after weeks of incredible fear-mongering on the part of both bosses’ parties and Wall Street, and will reach the President’s desk by the deadline on August 2nd. The contents of the final agreement remain rather vague, but the broad outline is enough to make clear what it means for workers in the U.S. It includes $2.4 trillion in spending cuts. President Obama stated on the 31st of July that “everything will be on the table,” and he has previously stated that Social Security and Medicare would not be spared cuts (in the name of “compromise”), so we can safely assume that a large portion of the $2.4 trillion in “savings” will be from the coffers of these vital public programs.

Its twelve years since the July 10 1999 killings at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, Nigeria. We reproduce an eye witness eye of the event.

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Five students were killed by a cultist gang, that is a neo-fascist type organisation, at Ife University. Our comrades were closely involved in the events and some of them are lucky to be alive, as the gang were looking for some of them. Luckily our comrades escaped.

As I write these lines the destinies of Greece are being decided in a titanic struggle in which the Greek working class is confronting the big banks and capitalists of all Europe. The EU is subjecting Greece to the most shameless blackmail. They say: either accept draconian cuts in your living standards, or else we will refuse to hand over the next tranche of 12 billion euros.

That would mean that the Greek government would soon run out of money. It would not be able to pay the wages of nurses, doctors, teachers or policemen. Greece would be bankrupt.